Or to Agamemnon’s sceptre:—­

     ‘Which never more shall leaves or blossoms bear.’

Iliad, i. 310.

[261] ’We agreed pretty well, only we disputed in adjusting the claims of merit between a shopkeeper of London and a savage of the American wildernesses.  Our opinions were, I think, maintained on both sides without full conviction; Monboddo declared boldly for the savage, and I, perhaps for that reason, sided with the citizen.’ Piozzi Letters, i. 115.

[262]

     ’Heroes are much the same, the point’s agreed,
      From Macedonia’s madman to the Swede;
      The whole strange purpose of their lives to find,
      Or make, an enemy of all mankind! 
      Not one looks backward, onward still he goes,
      Yet ne’er looks forward further than his nose.’

Essay on Man, iv. 219.

[263] Maccaroni is not in Johnson’s Dictionary.  Horace Walpole (Letters, iv. 178) on Feb. 6, 1764, mentions ’the Maccaroni Club, which is composed of all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses.’  On the following Dec. 16 he says:—­’The Maccaroni Club has quite absorbed Arthur’s; for, you know, old fools will hobble after young ones.’ Ib. p. 302.  See post, Sept. 12, for buck.

[264] ’We came late to Aberdeen, where I found my dear mistress’s letter, and learned that all our little people were happily recovered of the measles.  Every part of your letter was pleasing.’ Piozzi Letters, i. 115.  For Johnson’s use of the word mistress in speaking of Mrs. Thrale see ante, i. 494.

[265] See ante, ii. 455.  ‘They taught us,’ said one of the Professors, ’to raise cabbage and make shoes, How they lived without shoes may yet be seen; but in the passage through villages it seems to him that surveys their gardens, that when they had not cabbage they had nothing.’ Piozzi Letters, i. 116.  Johnson in the same letter says that ’New Aberdeen is built of that granite which is used for the new pavement in London.’

[266] ‘In Aberdeen I first saw the women in plaids.’ Piozzi Letters, i. 116.

[267] Seven years later Mackintosh, on entering King’s College, found there the son of Johnson’s old friend, ’the learned Dr. Charles Burney, finishing his term at Aberdeen.’  Among his fellow-students were also some English Dissenters, among them Robert Hall.  Mackintosh’s Life, i. 10, 13.  In Forbes’s Life of Beattie (ed. 1824, p. 169) is a letter by Beattie, dated Oct. 15, 1773, in which the English and Scotch Universities are compared.  Colman, in his Random Records, ii. 85, gives an account of his life at Aberdeen as a student.

[268] Lord Bolingbroke (Works, iii. 347) in 1735 speaks of ’the little care that is taken in the training up our youth,’ and adds, ’surely it is impossible to take less.’  See ante, ii. 407, and iii. 12.